A new anonymous essay published every day in December in the countdown to Christmas.

A sumo wrestling tournament. A failed coup ending in seppuku. A search for a forgotten man. How one writer’s trip to Japan became a journey through oblivion.

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of incisive and unconventional left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems, and art. Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank and Keith White as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Matthew Shen Goodman and headquartered in New York. It prints five print issues annually and publishes online nearly every day of the workweek.

This is a personal blog of Diana Leung featuring philosophical and analytical essays that explore a wide range of topics, including artificial intelligence, societal observations, psychological principles, and personal reflections on life and mortality.

A Hacker Manifesto is a critical manifesto written by McKenzie Wark, which criticizes the commodification of information in the age of digital culture and globalization. It was published in the United States in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto

Great essay on the evolution of home pages and the web

I use AI a lot for work, pretty much all day every day. I use coding assistants and custom agents I’ve built. I use AI to help code review changes, dig into bugs, and keep track of my projects. I’ve found lots of things it’s very helpful with, and lots of things it’s terrible at. If there’s one thing I have definitely learned: it does not work the way I imagined.

People keep asking me If I use Generative AI tools for coding and what I think of them, so this is my effort to put my thoughts in writing, so that I can send people here instead of having to repeat myself every time I get the question.

One of the major turning points in my life was reading my dad’s copy of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as a teenager. […] But Cialdini’s book was a turning point because it highlighted the very real limitations to human reasoning. No matter how smart you were, the mechanisms of your thinkings could easily be tricked in ways that completely bypassed your logical thinking and could insert ideas and trigger decisions that were not in your best interest.

The conversation isn’t over, but I don’t think I have much to add to it.

Interesting read that does not address the ethics of LLM training.

This review of the game Disco Elysium is a thoroughly enjoyable and nutritious read.

The UX profession has an aura of empathy and care for the people who use tech products. Businesses capitalise on this aura without having to entertain it.

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

Email is very far from being the securest thing out there right now. That’s not what I’m contesting at all.

My problem with this widely quoted and self-contradictory essay is that they have driven a lot of otherwise very smart people to give up on making email the best it can be.

And there are plenty of things where email is still the best thing around. It’s a miracle that a world-writable fully federated inbox system is as good as it is. Fedi is a spam pit, IRC a harassment nightmare, email is at the forefront of fighting those things. Of course we want encryption on that.

Proving you’re a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

Review & summaries of various current developments under the umbrella term “permacomputing”

Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn’t “hi,” isn’t necessarily “low” in any meaningful sense. We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology “ at all.